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Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?

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11–20 of 38 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?

#11
post #9

I put new facts into Anki ( https://apps.ankiweb.net/ ) and then they get reviewed daily, with a steady, slow addition of new facts. It's a very effective way to keep everything in long-term memory. (It's also very difficult. You're trying to recall items that are just at the edge of your memory.)

Interesting. Do you have fixed schedule every day to go through the facts in Anki or is it more on a ad hoc basis ?

Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?

#12
It doesn't make sense to keep going over an ever-growing pile of notes, like a team of developers who's added so many features they don't have time to do anything but maintain them. You want to organize your notes so that you can go over them just when you need them -- when you're finally seeing that weird concurrency problem, that's when you skim over those notes you took on CountDownLatch or dining philosophers or whatever. So organize them and tag them so when the time comes, you can search for "composite key best practices" or "composing decorators" or whatever.

Usually you get a fair amount of review just from the stuff you read while searching for other stuff you know is in there somewhere.

Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?

#13
post #3

Keeping a daily journal with relevant work and discoveries is great. You can use a simple text editor and keep appending the current date to the top of the file and writing a few a lines. You can do one per-project, or a general one for your daily life and activities. I reel back through the tape every few months when I'm curious about the timeline of development/research/discovery. Whittling it down, I think of it a…

Does the logs stick to your memory when you go through a bunch of them together at once every few months ? Will it not be an overload at one go ?

Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?

#15

I keep a log of things like "here's the parameters for tar to extract a file" (yeah, I know, there's man pages, but not all systems have them). I review that item when I have to extract files from a tar archive. Until then, I don't care if I forget it - that's what the file is for.

This approach works well for knowledge pockets where the discovery of application of knowledge is naive. When you want to extract a tar file and don't remember the command your brain know you have saved the command somewhere in a log and you can find it. But think of knowledge areas where you have to connect a few different learnings together to form an intuition on the application of knowledge to a problem.

Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?

#16
post #7

Started documenting the things I learn in a section of my website called "snippets". It's purpose is to be a registry of copy-paste resources, like a personal stack overflow, and I'm trying to keep it as small and short as possible. Also I don't write things there right away. First they go in a "backlog" in my notes, and once I require the knowledge but forget the details I transition it into a post on the website. T…

The 2 stage approach sounds interesting. Do you cycle out notes from the second stage (snippets website). Do you follow different review frequencies for those 2 stages.

Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?

#17
post #3

Keeping a daily journal with relevant work and discoveries is great. You can use a simple text editor and keep appending the current date to the top of the file and writing a few a lines. You can do one per-project, or a general one for your daily life and activities. I reel back through the tape every few months when I'm curious about the timeline of development/research/discovery. Whittling it down, I think of it a…

Does the logs stick to your memory when you go through a bunch of them together at once every few months ? Will it not be an overload at one go ?

What do you mean by "learning?" because I mean something specific: the ability to adapt to solving new problems. It's not something that is so easily reified and commodified. If "learning" is remembering a password or a combination of keystrokes, I would argue that that is closer to "rote memorization" and does not really reflect the character or qualities of "learning" that this method is more suitable for. You should only look through your long-term notes to help solidify what you already know. If it's still blurry, then I would argue the learning phase is not complete. Short-term notes like a notebook and scratchpad, or a dry-erase board and camera on your phone, are better for actual acquiring of knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?

#18
post #8

I find it terribly distracting to have all the things that I have tried to learn in my "active" memory. So I cycle between phases where I am engaged with a subject for a while, and then move on to the next item in my (circular) list until I cycle back to the original subject again. This is a serious impediment to developing any useful expertise in any area, but I have sort of made peace with this tendency. But not al…

I am more interested on how effectively we can apply the learnings to new problems. Sometimes it is not straight forward to connect the problem and the learnings. When application is not so straightforward, recalling the memory is out of question.

Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?

#19
post #10

(copy-pasted with modifications from my comment on a similar thread posted earlier) I used to have an elaborate system, but I converged on a simple solution: I stash everything in a single Google Docs document. I made the conscious decision to optimize for ease of use, so that the friction/effort to write something down is minimized. At the same time, I also made a decision to not to adopt any organization system --…

"I try to build systems that don't rely on sustained human discipline or the necessity of shoehorning into known organization units." +1 I completely agree on this.

The doc should have grown over time. Do you just append to the doc as you learn something new or do you organise learnings within the doc. I am asking this because if there is no structure there wouldn't there be too much of context switches when you go over them ?

Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?

#20
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the logs stick to your memory when you go through a bunch of them together at once every few months ? Will it not be an overload at one go ?

What do you mean by "learning?" because I mean something specific: the ability to adapt to solving new problems. It's not something that is so easily reified and commodified. If "learning" is remembering a password or a combination of keystrokes, I would argue that that is closer to "rote memorization" and does not really reflect the character or qualities of "learning" that this method is more suitable for. You shou…

You are spot on. Learning to me in this context is exactly what you have described "the ability to adapt to solving new problems". For e.g. within a social context a learning can be "when there is a mistake evaluate the intent rather the result". Another one related to work can be "Approach a product sale with an intent to solve the customer's pain and not to close the deal". There are too many of these learnings and many of them are deep. Thats why, I was wondering will one be able to get to the depth when many such learnings are reviewed at one go once every few months.
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